Saturday, July 17, 2010

The horror story of hardware support for a Sony PSP - a client's tale

July 17 2010

Guess who I called again this morning?

I called Sony support again for my son's PSP. I was again greeted by a very nice and polite tech support person. I explained the entire PSP saga to this person and in return I received multiple "I'm sorry" responses.

What can you do? Screaming at them isn't going to change anything, they have no administrative power at all. The only thing they can do is take down the complaint hoping that when someone that is probably playing Golf at the moment eventually reads it - if at all - and hopefully does something about it (when hell freezes over? Sounds like a good timeline).

This person starting typing, found the old request which at this point was expired. And then started typing again after correctly confirming all my information. I guess after all these calls it would only be fair that they finally get my email right. She checked it and it was right as well.

Out of boredom I switched over to my gmail account, and what do I see? And email from Sony support. I think that I actually had an urge to kiss this person on the other end of the phone. I thanked this person and informed them that I got the email only to be informed that the case wasn't submitted yet. Whatever email I received wasn't the right one.

I gave the ghost emails case number to my current contact and upon checking was told that this was the email from the previous call. Over 30 days ago. The support system actually sent me the much needed 30 day limited email with information I needed over 30 days after my call which essentially made it useless.

Go Sony...

My tech support contact was patient and finished the case, they also took the precaution (given our track record) of verbally giving me all the information so I could take it down, should yet another email disappear in the great email void.

But, before we hung up the email did come. Two emails from Sony in one day. This was a record!

I hung up, armed with all the information that I needed, ran to the post office, paid the 12$ of shipping which included buying a box and a padded envelope and waived the unit goodbye. It was finally on it's way to be fixed.